I can only imagine Subby's thought process:"Well, I've never much cared for children... and honestly, the thought of getting crushed by a multi-ton machine hurtling out of the sky covered in spinning blades kind of turns me on. Plus, the additional death toll is kind of sexy! I think prison is very harsh for people who make my fantasies come true."

This wasn't a mistake. He didn't accidentally sweep his laser across the sky and light up a helicopter. This was intentional and deliberate. 14 years is noteworthy (the article did list his priors as likely contributing to the length of the sentence), but it is not an insane reaction.

Well... its basically established that nobody has ever been significantly harmed by this, except for a few very minor eye injuries. So really the lesson isn't, "Actions should have no consequences." It's "Actions that are essentially proven to not harm anyone but could conceivably do so should not be punished the same as second degree murder."

Also his offenses were DUIs and a burglary. It isn't like he's been out killing people with a hammer.

A guy who shows aan escalating pattern of willlfully placing others at risk (DUI's plus the laser incident) does deserve a harsher sentence.

I also find it disingenuous when people take the outliers from one extreme (10 years for murder) and compare them to outliers from a different extreme and treat the as if they were equivalent. The standard sentence for this crime was 18 months, not 14 years. The standard sentence for murder is not 10 years.

By the way, statistically speaking, driving drunk is almost certainly not going to cause an accident. If you look at the frequency that people do it (usually without getting caught) and the number of accidents, you would not find it to be statistically significant. So, should DUI not be considered a crime?

Gyrfalcon:Mikey1969: They really have to design something that would refract a laser, yet be transparent, and implement it into visors worn by these pilots before some asshole sends an aircraft to the ground and kills people. So with the way lasers work, would even polarized wombats help? Something has got to work, right?

I'm liking this April Fools thing.

"Polarized wombats", heh.

I've been having fun with it, too. Usually on purpose, but I've been trying to craft my posts to actually work as sentences with the philters in place. Obviously the 'polarized wombats' one slipped by. I think it would be awesome if this was a full time thing, and maybe they added 10-15 words each year. Politics Threads would be far less contentious when the posts make no sense because someone didn't know about the banmonkeys or how you can have lots more angry otters, but the fancy lads would be [redacted by the NSA] for Taft.

I guess subby thinks that those flight jockeys and their sick patients deserve to be farked with? ...or killed?

Or, just maybe, some people don't believe in putting a human being in a cage for 14 years over an incident in which no one was injured, killed, or raped. You know, like some sort "human being" who can "empathize with others" and who knows that people make dumb mistakes sometimes and they probably shouldn't have their lives destroyed over it.

Attempted murder is not making "a dumb mistake" you sh#t stain.

Attempted murder implies intent. Reckless endangerment is a better term, and doesn't get you 14 years. The only reason this this guy got 14 years is because it involved an aircraft and the FAA is trying to make examples of people. The punishment is not proportional to the crime, shiat stain. No decent human being would support locking someone away for 14 years based on a crime in which no one was injured, killed, or traumatized. Hell, they've had 100s of laser strikes in that area alone in the last year. Guess how many planes and helicopters have crashed from laser strikes? ZERO.

I guess subby thinks that those flight jockeys and their sick patients deserve to be farked with? ...or killed?

Or, just maybe, some people don't believe in putting a human being in a cage for 14 years over an incident in which no one was injured, killed, or raped. You know, like some sort "human being" who can "empathize with others" and who knows that people make dumb mistakes sometimes and they probably shouldn't have their lives destroyed over it.